Transportation costs balloon for South Shore schools

More and more, school officials are wondering how they'll pay for both as fuel costs rise and the number of kids riding the bus from their home to special, distant schools continues to grow.

Busing costs are eating up more of the money budgeted for public education than ever before, with a Patriot Ledger review of 25 local districts’ finances showing multimillion-dollar increases in the cost of school transportation in recent years.

Last year, Plymouth spent $4.4 million busing kids to school, more than any other South Shore district. That amounted to about 6.5 percent of its entire school budget.

Cash-strapped Randolph saved $500,000 last year – and likely the jobs of 10 teachers – by eliminating buses for students in kindergarten through sixth grade. Now, it’s strictly up to parents to get their kids to school and no one, least of all school officials, is happy about it.

The cost to bring regular education students to school has increased a seemingly moderate 9 percent over six years. But that figure takes on a new meaning when you consider that the number of regular education students riding the bus on the South Shore decreased by 22 percent during the same period.

The real budget-buster is in transporting special education students. Area districts spent about $10 million to do that during the 2000-01 school year. Last year, they spent $18 million – an 80 percent hike in six years.

And as more and more students are designated as having special needs, the cost to bus them to specialized, out-of-town programs has ballooned. In some towns, including Milton and Hanover, the cost to bus special education students is now more than double that to bus regular education students.

“Special education transportation costs have been skyrocketing,” said Stephen Theall, executive director of the Massachusetts Organization of Educational Collaboratives, which works to combine communities’ busing bids and routes to save money. “Statewide, between 1995 and 2007, there was a 143 percent increase in SPED (special education) costs, as opposed to 78 percent for regular education.”

Several things factor into price increases, including ever-rising insurance costs and gas prices, particularly for diesel, which the big bus contractors serving the region use. A gallon of diesel cost $1.63 in 2001, according to the state Division of Energy Resources. A gallon of diesel sold for $4.15 this past week.

“You go through sticker shock when you fill up (your own car),” said Clifton Johnson of First Student bus company. “Imagine what it’s like when you’ve got 10 or 50 or 100 buses that need to be filled with the kind of mileage they use.”

School districts are required by state law to bus students from kindergarten through sixth grade who live more than a mile and a half from their school.

Randolph managed to eliminate that cost by redistricting so that no student lived more than that distance from their classrooms.

“If we had kept buses, then we would have had to cut teachers,” said Steve Moore, business manager for Randolph schools. “There isn't anything left to cut.”

Weymouth has increased its bus fees twice over the last six years to keep pace with fuel costs. Families of students that the district isn’t legally required to bus must now pay $235 a year, per student.

A bill in the House would create a commission to study changes in state reimbursements to cities and towns for busing. And a bill in the Senate seeks to reimburse districts “for any extraordinary price increases” over the amount budgeted for school transportation.

Meanwhile, groups like the Dedham-based Massachusetts Organization of Educational Collaboratives are bringing districts together to figure out ways to save money on out-of-district transportation, like combining routes. This year it added the Rockland-based North River Collaborative to its pool. It wants to go statewide next year.

Johnson, the First Student executive, said that as costs have risen, districts have been trying to find ways – like staggering elementary, middle and high school pick-up times – to get more students to school without adding buses.

“What we’re seeing now is people trying to get more efficient,” he said.

Still, districts struggle to please parents and students, while keeping a close eye on the bottom line. It isn’t easy.

“The biggest challenge we have is parents wanting more service while the prices are going up,” Plymouth school business administrator Robert Gurek said.